[ft-announce] Announcing FreeType 2.8

[Werner LEMBERG]

FreeType 2.8 has been released.

It is available from

    http://savannah.nongnu.org/download/freetype/

or

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/freetype/files/

The latter site also holds older versions of the FreeType library.

See below for the relevant snippet from the CHANGES file.

Enjoy!


   Werner


PS: Downloads from  savannah.nongnu.org  will redirect to your nearest
    mirror site.   Files on  mirrors may  be subject to  a replication
    delay   of   up   to   24   hours.   In   case   of  problems  use
    http://download-mirror.savannah.gnu.org/releases/


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http://www.freetype.org


FreeType 2  is a software  font engine that  is designed to  be small,
efficient,  highly   customizable,  and  portable   while  capable  of
producing high-quality output (glyph images) of most vector and bitmap
font formats.

Note that  FreeType 2 is  a font service  and doesn't provide  APIs to
perform higher-level features, like text layout or graphics processing
(e.g.,  colored  text  rendering,  `hollowing',  etc.).   However,  it
greatly simplifies these tasks by providing a simple, easy to use, and
uniform interface to access the content of font files.

FreeType  2  is  released  under  two open-source  licenses:  our  own
BSD-like FreeType  License and the  GPL.  It can  thus be used  by any
kind of projects, be they proprietary or not.


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CHANGES BETWEEN 2.7.1 and 2.8

  I. IMPORTANT CHANGES

    - Support for OpenType Variation Fonts is now complete.   The last
      missing part was handling the `VVAR' and `MVAR' tables, which is
      available with this release.

    - A new  function `FT_Face_Properties' allows the  control of some
      module  and   library  properties  per  font.    Currently,  the
      following properties can be  handled: stem darkening, LCD filter
      weights, and the random seed for the `random' CFF operator.

    - The PCF change to show more `colourful' family names (introduced
      in version 2.7.1) was too radical; it can now be configured with
      PCF_CONFIG_OPTION_LONG_FAMILY_NAMES   at   compile   time.    If
      activated, it can  be switched off at run time  with the new pcf
      property  `no-long-family-names'.  If  the `FREETYPE_PROPERTIES'
      environment variable is available, you can say

        FREETYPE_PROPERTIES=pcf:no-long-family-names=1

    - Support  for  the  following  scripts  has  been  added  to  the
      auto-hinter.

        Adlam, Avestan, Bamum, Buhid, Carian, Chakma, Coptic, Cypriot,
        Deseret, Glagolitic, Gothic, Kayah, Lisu, N'Ko, Ol Chiki, Old
        Turkic, Osage, Osmanya, Saurashtra, Shavian, Sundanese, Tai
        Viet, Tifinagh, Unified Canadian Syllabics, Vai


  II. IMPORTANT BUG FIXES

    - `Light' auto-hinting  mode no  longer uses TrueType  metrics for
      TrueType  fonts.   This bug  was  introduced  in version  2.4.6,
      causing   horizontal  scaling   also.    Almost  all   GNU/Linux
      distributions (with Fedora as  a notable exception) disabled the
      corresponding patch for good reasons; chances are thus high that
      you won't notice a difference.

      If  optical backward  compatibility for  legacy applications  is
      necessary, you might enable the AF_CONFIG_OPTION_TT_SIZE_METRICS
      configuration option.   However, it  is strongly  recommended to
      avoid that, adjusting font sizes instead.

    - If a TrueType font gets loaded with FT_LOAD_NO_HINTING, FreeType
      now scales  the font linearly  again (bug introduced  in version
      2.4.6).

    - CVE-2017-8105,  CVE-2017-8287:  Older   FreeType  versions  have
      out-of-bounds  writes  caused  by  heap-based  buffer  overflows
      related to Type 1 fonts.

        https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2017-8105
        https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2017-8287


  III. MISCELLANEOUS

    - A  new function  `FT_Set_Default_Properties' has  been added  to
      parse    the    `FREETYPE_PROPERTIES'    environment    variable
      (previously, it  was internal only).   `FT_Init_FreeType' always
      call this  function, but  `FT_New_Library' does not  (similar to
      `FT_Add_Default_Modules').

    - To be in sync with OpenType version 1.7 and newer, macros

        FT_PARAM_TAG_IGNORE_PREFERRED_FAMILY,
        FT_PARAM_TAG_IGNORE_PREFERRED_SUBFAMILY,
        TT_NAME_ID_PREFERRED_FAMILY
        TT_NAME_ID_PREFERRED_SUBFAMILY

      are renamed to

        FT_PARAM_TAG_IGNORE_TYPOGRAPHIC_FAMILY,
        FT_PARAM_TAG_IGNORE_TYPOGRAPHIC_SUBFAMILY,
        TT_NAME_ID_TYPOGRAPHIC_FAMILY
        TT_NAME_ID_TYPOGRAPHIC_SUBFAMILY

      The old macro names are deprecated (but still available).

    - Support for SFNT `name' tables has been improved.

      . Format  1 `name' tables  are now supported.  Use  new function
        `FT_Get_Sfnt_LangTag' to access associated language tags.

      . Language, encoding, and name IDs have been updated to OpenType
        version 1.8.1.

    - The new CFF  engine now handles the `random'  operator.  All CFF
      opcodes are now supported.

    - The CFF module  has a new property `random-seed'  to control the
      pseudo-random number generation for the `random' operator.

    - The `freetype-config' script is now a wrapper of `pkg-config' if
      this program is available in the path.

    - FT_LOAD_TARGET_LCD  is now  a  variant of  FT_LOAD_TARGET_LIGHT;
      this should provide better rendering results.

    - A mode to display  light auto-hinting with sub-pixel positioning
      has been added to `ftdiff'.